Letters from London: the personal blog of Natasha Loder of The Economist

Saturday, April 02, 2005

One-third of paradise and other stories

It has been a busy time in the last month or so. Two big pieces published in that time that are outside of the Economist subscription wall. The best, I think, is one reporting on a meeting in Washington where there was a discussion about how much of the fabled Iraqi marshlands could be restored. The scientists reckon this is about 30%, the article, though, raises some issues about the actual practicality of achieving this.

The second story is a little bit more arcane but a fascinating one if you are at all interested in the saga of America's space programme. It highlights an odd bit of American non-proliferation legislation that will prevent the US buying Russian Soyuz rockets, the article argues that it could have profound implications for the future of the space programme.

No plan B for outer space Mar 10th 2005 America's plans for humans to explore space may cause it to relax its laws on weapons proliferation

Another space story, this one behind the subscription wall. A young researcher in the US has been analysing pictures from the Hubble telescope and argues in her PhD thesis that the images owe rather more to artistic license than those behind the pictures let on. The piece goes on to say that it is the popularity of images from Hubble that have given the instrument such widescale support, and why there is such a fight on to preserve it. Many of the images go through a lot of processing in order for them to look like the amazing polished pictures we see, and some artefacts (i.e. things that are not there) are left in the picture for effect. This may not matter, but it isn't science. What I didn't get the space to mention in the piece, but is well known, is that the Hubble Archive Project-the team that creates these pictures-actually has a tiny amount of dedicated telescope time in order to take the pictures. This has been slightly controversial because a telescope that was designed and built for science is being used to take pretty pictures. This tiny diversion of resources is finally paying off as even the politicians join the fight to save Hubble.

This is a little round up of the Millennium Ecosystem Report, an accurate but slightly depressing global view of the state of the planet's ecosystem services. A forest, a grassland, a wetland, a pond are all examples of ecosystems. A byproduct of the species that live in them are a number of services, such as water filtration and pollination of crops. Basically a lot of stuff we get from nature for free. The good news is that it is becoming increasingly clear that these services are something that we depend on and that there is quite a lot we can do to improve their status. Subscribers only.

Finally, a little piece that tries to clear up confusion about whether or not life on Mars has been discovered. The short answer is that it hasn't, although several reports have suggested an announcement is imminent. Subscribers only.